Otherworldly Maine (38 page)

could it be belief in heaven, rather than spiritual certainty or belief in God, that relieves mortal anxiety?

—heaven: a kind of alternate universe accessible primarily through death, perhaps also through trance or vision

—carrying heavy moral weight (unlike most other alternate universes)

—pre-existent to this universe? i.e. not a result of bifurcations of it or of universes preceding; or perhaps a very early bifurcation

but a universe accessible by death is not therapeutically useful when the interior aim is to
avoid
untimely death

ways other than death to access alternate universes:

—inward: meditation, hypnosis, trance, aided by fasting, drugs, pain

—outward: specialized technology (not yet known), travel at a particular speed or direction, key geographical points/gateways, transitional objects

is
belief
in the alternate universe necessary to reach it (as perhaps to reach heaven)?

—then the agnostic is doomed; neither science nor theology can save her

(unless in writing this book I find a way—)

AN OUTSIDE TRIP

Despite Katherine's anxieties, she persists in the belief that only total immersion in the vagaries of life will eventually bring security. She knows she thinks too much. To get out of her head, out of her anxieties, she goes to the supermarket. Instead of imagining the universes that may be splitting off as she chooses to take this road instead of that, this parking space instead of that, this shopping cart instead of that, she focuses on the tastes she plans to bring home: mango, pineapple, strawberries. Plain first, then with vanilla yogurt, then whipped with a little sugar and spice into an East Indian lassi.

Her mouth waters.

The man in front of her in the checkout line has a basket full of hamburger, a dozen packages. None have been put into a protective plastic bag, although these are provided in the meat section. When Katherine buys hamburger, she pulls a plastic bag over her hand like a glove, picks up the package of meat, then pulls the bag back up, never touching the original plastic-wrap packaging. Who knows, a little juice might have dripped out, a little meat spilled, bacteria-filled, contaminated.

Katherine has never contracted food poisoning at home.

She watches the man load the hamburger onto the conveyor belt, notices the wet spot underneath when he shifts the packages to make room for more, a crumb of red that might have oozed out of the plastic-wrap. She looks at her mango and pineapple (there were no strawberries today). Alternate universes spin before her: Despite the hamburger, nothing happens, she washes everything thoroughly and stays well. Or she has a touch of food poisoning, recovers. Or she dies of a new modern virulent form of E. coli. Or—

She excuses herself from the line, mumbling something about a forgotten item. But she forgot nothing. On the contrary, she remembers too much. She heads for another line, stops in her tracks. Who's to say the customer three or four places ahead of her, already in the parking lot, didn't leave the cashier's hands and the conveyor belt already contaminated?

She decides to go back to the produce department for plastic bags for her fruit. Then she spots a cashier spritzing her station with disinfectant, wiping everything down, switching on the light that says the lane is open. Katherine scurries over, stepping in front of a slow old man with a package of pork chops. She smiles apologetically; he nods and his eyes twinkle. She puts the mango and pineapple onto a conveyor belt, which still glistens with disinfectant. She will wash them before cutting them up, before closing her mouth around their incomparable sweetness. But she feels confident that even if the washing is not perfect, the fruit will not sicken her in this universe she has chosen/created.

If she gets sick, it will not be her fault. She has done what she can.

creating the secure universe: the aspiration of the mortally anxious

their ritual objects: plastic bags, helmets, antibacterial sprays, locks, alarms, sensors, diagnostic tests, seatbelts, organic foods, insurance policies

limits on creation of the “safe” universe:

—ability to choose universes by taking precautions is limited to hazards which can be foreseen and prevented

—for unforeseen/unforeseeable events, the only chance to choose lies in catching that moment, the fulcrum moment

—but
how
to access other universes through that moment?

A REAL TEST

The phone rings. Katherine puts down the fork with mango still skewered upon it, reaches for the phone, pauses with her hand extended. She senses her mother at the other end of the line, tries to picture her face: relieved? devastated? worried but hopeful? This is it, the moment, she feels it, she
knows
it. How does she turn it aside? By never answering the phone? By answering in this moment rather than the next, by waiting another ring? By closing her eyes and taking some inward turn in her mind? By clicking her heels, turning left three times, saying “abracadabra”?

She sweats, she fights tears, but she cannot move her mind/self/reality into position to leap/fall/dissolve from this universe into another. She feels herself toppling into the well of anxiety, but rallies and lifts the phone. Hello.

Hello. Her mother's voice is strained. She wastes no time. “It” is malignant. She will have surgery right away. The doctor is hopeful. But—

Katherine watches the moment recede in her rear-view mental mirror, feels herself sitting at the bifurcation of universes—they split and split again into a great cauliflower-like fractal of possibilities, of realities—innumerable universes exploding from the moment and mushrooming up and out (those organic metaphors again) in great clouds.

In which universe does her mother die soon, die later, respond to treatment, not respond, go into remission, experience a complete cure?

Katherine hangs onto the phone, the tips of her fingers whiten. She wishes she could reach out and grab onto the “good” universes, let them pull her along and her mother with her, into a place where squirrels still frolic and beagles play and, if she cannot avoid all pain, at least she can exercise some choice about which pain to experience and which to let go.

But the universes slip from her hands like so many silken cords. She clings to the one that remains, praying, with all that is within her, that this is the right one, the one where she belongs, and that the pain will not be more than she—than I—can bear.

T
wo hundred years have peeled paint, broken shingles, and cracked the granite step of the shed that houses the Healy Tompkins Museum. The beams are sound, the floor solid, and most of the glass original. Everything in the museum is in this same state: whole inside, broken only outside.

Periodically the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society make these outsides someone's business. Jenny Alcock feared that it would happen to her someday. Her mother doesn't attend the Historical Society; her father drives for an out-of-town vending company owned by an old French family. Who else at Pithom Independent High School is better suited for the task? Everyone else has their excuses: camp, job, summer school, parents with influence. It is a long, solitary task, and she protests. But even her own mother insists. It will keep Jenny out of trouble.

Askew on the wall hang amber-colored panoramics of uniformed men, with names scrawled in what looks like white ink. In one cabinet, a Down East sailor's ropework valentine beds down beside a carved lacquer cup stand from China. A thin, balding rug from Ghiordes carpets the floor in faded Turkish red and yellow. A Spanish silver candlestick, supplied with a beeswax candle, occupies a George I burl walnut side table. (So the labels say.) The silver is tarnished, and alternating seasons of damp summer heat and dry winter cold have split the walnut veneer.

To Jenny such decay is at once opulent and familiar. At home, linoleum peels away from the floorboards, hard water has pitted and stained the stainless-steel sink, pink sheets are mended with blue thread. Thumbtacks hold sun-faded Polaroids to a wall. They have no names written on them.

No one in Jenny's home (except maybe Jenny, now and then) ever cares about these things. The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society, however, do worry about dust and tarnish, at least now and then. It is the only tolerable thing about them. Jenny just wishes that they would care for someone other than Healy Tompkins, at least now and then.

Healy Tompkins was a paper-mill baron and traveler almost a hundred years ago. He went often to Egypt on business and made pilgrimages to most of the Christian shrines in Jerusalem, of which she finds old photographs in a steamer trunk. One cabinet is devoted to such things as “Sliver of the True Cross” and “Saint Peter's Tympanum.” But of all Healy Tompkins's Egyptian travels, this museum holds only one souvenir.

The label, pounded out on an old Underwood that cut out all the o's, reads: Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

Covered in dust as thick as gray felt, it feels light, like the paper-mâche parrot she made in seventh grade. Light as a bird.

A wooden mask, once gilded but now mostly bare, encases the head. Jenny pities it, wings all linen-bound, and she always dusts it twice each week.

Why had Healy Tompkins returned to Pithom, Maine, of all the places in the world he could have gone? Jenny thinks about this while she wipes the bull's-eye window panes and soon decides that his mill and his bank accounts and his big house must have been enough for him. Those days, however, are long past. The paper mill is a ruin.

Why did any Alcock—once millwrights, now painters and carpenters and truckers—ever stay?

Jenny envies her father and the company truck, his road trips to Portland's shopping centers, its airport, all its people. Each time he went out, she thinks as she props a stereoview of the Wailing Wall on a shelf, it was a little like Healy Tompkins's pilgrimages.

Her father has spent a lot of time away lately, although Portland is scarcely an hour's drive from Pithom, and last night her parents fought about that. This morning her mother, still in pink curlers and white feathered slippers, followed him out into the dooryard. Was he coming home tonight? Of course, he said, he always came home (although he had not been home the night before last). He was sorry, he was so very sorry, Ellen, Ellen, it was nothing, nothing at all, just one night. Then they kissed, memory of their harsh words swept away by promises and I'm-sorries.

Jenny, whom no one balms with promises or I'm-sorries, does not, cannot, forget. Memory of what has happened coats her like dirt.

She dusts the hawk—poor thing—for the third time this week, wishing that someone, just someone, would do as much for her someday.

As the ceiling fan vibrates the overhead light, the hawk winks its black glass eyes.

The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society usually arrive at four.

Someone from the Maine State Museum will be visiting, they say and run a white glove across the glass display cases, put a cotton wad on a yardstick and thrust it down behind shelves. This won't be like your parents' trailer, they say. It's to be cleaned and polished, the panoramics of Union soldiers will hang so evenly that Mrs. Egars will be able to balance a pea on top. The same grade of paper will be used for each label, all t's crossed, i's dotted, and p's and q's properly tidy, that's how it's to be you little snot.

One of these inspections dislodges a sheet of brown paper behind the mummy.

Which leaps from its shelf.

Mrs. Egars jumps two feet straight. Madame President Wallace shrieks and throws herself to the floor, but the hawk follows. It is five minutes before everyone has calmed down enough to see that Mrs. Egars knocked it over with the yardstick.

For all its hard fall, the hawk mummy's glass eyes stare as brightly as ever, looking proud of its first flight in more than two thousand years.

The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society leave early that day.

The paper, written by Healy Tompkins, is headed: Book of the Dead, Chapter LXXVII. Transforming to Hawk of Gold. Am I, it goes in English beneath Egyptian hieroglyphs, rise I from secret place like hawk of gold coming from egg his. Fly I like hawk of cubits seven across back his. Be glorious I.

The English is fractured, as if he'd written drunk (wouldn't that shock the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society!), but the writing is businesslike. The hieroglyphs marching between the lines of English are neat and tidy and precisely drawn.

She likes it. More than two thousand years ago some ancient Egyptian had felt exactly the way she feels. Unlike her mother (who again this morning went out to the dooryard in pink curlers, the feathers of her slippers now tattered and brown), Jenny Alcock is going to leave behind this town and make something of herself. She will be free and with her she will take no dusty excuses, no filthy I'm-sorries.

Having dusted the hawk again, she turns to the panoramics. She sees typically Egars noses, the broad hands of Mackees. In all these years they have not changed. The new Wallaces look like the old Wallaces. Even in some Great-Great-Great-Uncle Somebody Alcock she can see a reflection of herself and she shivers. But there are no Tompkinses in Pithom. Not anymore.

Soon perhaps there will be no new Alcocks in Pithom, either. Because, unlike her father (who again this morning said he was sorry, Ellen, and promised that of course he would be home tonight), when Jenny leaves, she will never come back.

On an old Underwood she types new labels, hitting the o gently, so as not to cut out the letters. She tends to the photographs first, then to the sailor's valentine. Lastly she taps out a new label for Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

But what, then, about the paper written out by Healy Tompkins? The poem should be written better, and she will, and playa trick on the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society.